My career in developing large scale systems that allow people to
express themselves and communicate started in 1999 with Xanga. I
left after a couple years and got more academic about the
democratization of information on the web. Ironically, I wrote
two books about blogging. In 2002, I tried to start a
microblogging service but have you heard of Sideblogger? Didn't
think so.

When I joined the Blogger team at Google in 2003, my new
environment had everything I could possibly want and so much
more. It turns out that I would start working with a couple guys
who would end up close friends and lifelong collaborators—Evan
Williams and Jason Goldman. In 2005, I learned to my surprise
that working with Ev was more important than staying at Google.

Ev left Google and I followed him shortly thereafter. I helped
him with a startup that didn't quite work out. We tried to sell
it, but no luck. To save the day, Ev generously created Obvious—a
company to buy this failure back from the investors with his own
money. Jason Goldman joined us and the idea was that we could
live our dream—developing multiple projects under one company
with nobody to answer to but ourselves.

The assets of Ev's freshly acquired failure included Twitter—a
project I had put much effort into with Jack Dorsey and others.
It was something we were endlessly ridiculed for as being
"useless" but we believed in it and Evan believed in us so he
kept funding us until Twitter started spreading like wildfire. In
2007 Jack, Ev, and myself founded Twitter, Inc with outside
capital.

Although it was incubated for about half a year at Obvious,
Twitter was now it's own fast growing company and it demand all
of our attention. The company Ev had created started a couple
projects but ultimately faded out of the picture. So, for more
than 5 years our attention was focused on Twitter as it grew from
a "useless" toy to a particularly informative global phenomenon
with amazing potential.

The Dream Lives

My work on Twitter has spanned more than half a decade and I will
continue to work with the company for many years to come. During
this time—especially lately, it has come to my attention that the
Twitter crew and its leadership team have grown incredibly
productive. I've decided that the most effective use of my time
is to get out of the way until I'm called upon to be of some
specific use.

Twitter CEO Dick Costolo has been very supportive in thinking
this through with me so I can focus on new endeavors while
remaining a strategic asset to Twitter. My plan is to take a bit
more time to focus on helping schools, nonprofits, and company
advisory boards as well as The Biz and Livia Stone Foundation.
I'll still commit part of my time to hands on help with Twitter
wherever and whenever I can be of assistance.

As for the bulk of my time day-to-day, I'm thrilled to announce
that Evan Williams, Jason Goldman and myself will be relaunching
The Obvious Corporation as
co-founders. Our plan is to develop new projects and work on
solving big problems aligned along a simple mission statement:
The Obvious Corporation develops systems that help people work
together to improve the world. This is a dream come true!